I discovered this track in one of your live sets, and I was really surprised by it. How did you get to this?
I actually heard this being played by Ron Hardy at the Music Box.
Ah, so it was Ron Hardy who inspired you then?
The people that have inspired me musically where I am now is Ron Hardy, Larry Levan, Larry Heard and fortunately but unfortunately Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain. Those are pretty much some of my strongest influences. Later on it became people like Farley Jack Master Funk when he was really bringing it to the table musically on the radio, and from that point on it’s like my whole world expanded, it expanded to unparalleled paradox.
In regards of “Diskomo,” though, when I heard Ron Hardy play it, it didn’t make sense to me because I wasn’t on drugs. But a lot of people that were in the party scene at that time were experimenting with drugs. Ron would spin records faster, because he was under the influence. So the thing is I probably heard “Diskomo” at a faster speed. You never knew what Ron was doing at this time, so when you hear “Diskomo” and you hear these sort of patterns and tone pads and kind of modular effects like wind and stuff in this manner, it was hard to tell what was what. If you were in that time period, would you think that was Ron Hardy, or would you think that was a record?
It has a really eerie atmosphere…
It’s the same thing with Ian Curtis, and what Joy Division did. The producer behind them gave that whole thing atmosphere, that sort of specialness. And that’s what “Discomo” did for me when I heard it.
This new wave post punk music is not necessarily something you would associate with early house, which is kind of peculiar, but you seem to be attracted to this kind of music…
This is house music. That’s the thing that nobody—and let’s make this clear, I am nobody to tell you what is and what isn’t the truth—but I can tell you what I know and what I saw. And it was the innovation that Larry and Ron undertook, and it’s the innovation that I have personally taken on myself. I am singlehandedly the ambassador of truth right now. I feel like I have singlehandedly taken on the roles of these artists in the way that they described their music and the way that they played their music, and I feel that I’m someone that can say that this music that has somehow been forgotten has a greater significance than people can imagine.
New Order – Video 5-8-6 (1982)
Let’s talk about New Order. This has a kind of long-jam approach to recording, but it is also kind of a blueprint, not only for later electronic developments, but also for their own developments. There are already shadings of “Blue Monday” in it, but it is much earlier, 1982.
I play “Video 586” in my sessions. I play every type of sound known, and I am probably the world’s biggest risk taker. There are probably three other people that I could say right now that are as risky as I am.
Who are they?
Mick Wills, from Stuttgart, Germany, James T. Cotton and myself. And, actually, someone who is on another level to also give full etiquette and education and experience is Jamal Moss. In my eyes, even though he doesn’t DJ, musically what he does with IBM and these other projects… it’s not the sort of stuff that you would usually hear.
But he does DJ, doesn’t he?
Jamal is one of my guys, and I have never seen him play wax. But what I have of him, the material that I have gotten from him, is still sick. It’s like another level of Ron Hardy through Jamal Moss. Without a doubt.
You seem to be quite like-minded in your approach…
Well, “Video 586” is an idea that I didn’t realize that was important until later, Jamal didn’t realize until later, that JTC didn’t realize was important later. It’s the idea of not following the law of 4/4 music, or the law of what it should be. This is what made music risky, and this is what made New Order risky.
Why do so few DJ’s take risks that way do you think?
Because they are scared. They’re scared to lose the crowd, they are scared to be risky, to do something that they have never done. That’s why you have something called the social chain, and it’s what everybody else follows. I am not on the social chain. Those people that I have mentioned, Mick Wills, James T. Cotton, Jamal are guys that I know do not play by the rules.
So is that your main agenda? To change the set of rules?
My main agenda is to change the rules to the way that they should be. The way that everybody is crying, “Why can’t it be like the days when I was growing up.” Because this is the point, think about it: Why do people play records from the old days? Because they wanna remember. Why do you always have to remember the past? Why can’t you deal with now? Read the rest of this entry »
In discussion with Philip Sherburne about “The Flat Earth” by Thomas Dolby (1984).
Why did you choose this album, and how did you come across Thomas Dolby in the first place?
Until I was 12 or 13, I got most of my pop music from Top 40 radio. There weren’t a lot of other options for kid living in suburban Portland, Oregon in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and I loved a lot of things that I’d probably cringe at now, simply because they were all that was available. This is not one of them, though. Thomas Dolby’s “The Flat Earth” has remained a personal favorite for a quarter century now, and within it I can find many of the seeds of my eventual love for electronic music. I don’t remember any first encounter with Thomas Dolby’s 1982 single “She Blinded Me With Science,” which was all over the radio that year. I’m sure it was the synths and samples that grabbed me. I had discovered synthesizers through the music shop where I bought piano sheet music – Bach, Czerny, Phil Collins – and was nuts about anything with synths in it (In 1983, I’d get one of my own, a Korg Poly-800). Curiously, I didn’t dig any further into Dolby’s music at the time, but then, the song was ubiquitous, and in retrospect, it was such an odd single it probably didn’t gesture towards a form bigger than itself, like an album. It was what it was, and that was plenty. In 1984 or 1985, I went through a brief period of checking out LPs from the Multnomah County Library. That’s where I came across „The Flat Earth“. It was the cover that got me. Around that time, I would latch onto anything that had the faintest hint of “new wave” to it, and the cover’s pseudoscientific markings and cryptic photo-montage seemed like the most modern thing I’d ever seen. In retrospect, the sleeve is hardly so dazzling — a slightly watered down version of Peter Saville. (In fact, it looks a little like a cross between the Durutti Column’s “Circuses & Bread” and Section 25’s “From the Hip”, but it lacks the elegance of either.) Still, it was good enough for a 14-year-old jonesing for the New. I remember sitting on the floor of my parents’ living room, hunched over the sleeve, trying to make sense of the whole package. Not to repeat myself, but “cryptic” is the only word that fits. Everything about the music seemed to hint at hidden meanings, from the sleeve to the lyrics: “Keith talked in alphanumerals,” after all. Who the hell was the guy panning for gold on the cover? Who were these mysterious Mulu, people of the rainforest? What was a drug cathedral, and why an octohedron? (I had so much to learn.) Etc., etc. I’ve long since stopped caring much about lyrics, much less concept albums, but I was young and impressionable then, and every flip of the record seemed to offer another clue as to some strange, grownup world I couldn’t begin to decipher. The same went for the music, of course. For starters, there was the stylistic range: “Dissidents” and “White City” were recognizable as pop music, after a fashion, but what was “Screen Kiss”? It presented a kind of liquidity I don’t remember having recognized in music before that – first in the fretless bass, the synthesizers and the stacked harmonies, and even the chord changes, but mainly it was the way it trailed off into the scratchy patter of L.A. traffic reports, multi-tracked and run through delay. I’d never heard the “real world” breaking into pop music before, and certainly not spun into such a purely “ambient” sound. “Mulu the Rain Forest” was another weird one – again, an approximation of ambient, long before I’d discover it. And “I Scare Myself” totally threw me for a loop. What was a Latin lounge jazz song doing here, especially sandwiched between the humid “Mulu” and the jagged, chromed funk of “Hyperactive”? There was no doubting the continuity of the album, but the pieces felt at odds, as fractured as the cut-up sleeve imagery; the sequencing seemed erratic and the two sides of the LP felt out of balance with each other, and yet you couldn’t have put it together any other way. Just like venturing to the edge of the (flat) earth, flipping the record had a weirdly vertiginous quality to it. (I was, you may note, an unusually impressionable adolescent, at least where music was concerned.)
At the time I got this it took some time to grow on me. Was it the same with you or was it love at first sight?
A little of both. There was definitely something off-putting about the record at first, but I devoured it anyway. I’d go so far as to say that the parts that alienated me were precisely what sent me back into it. I wanted to figure it out. All this might sound a little silly now. Today, I can recognize that a lot of it is pretty overblown, beginning with the lyrics: “My writing/ is an iron fist/ in a glove full of Vaseline”? That’s… pretty awful. (Also, it may go some way towards explaining the purplish quality of my own youthful stabs at poesy.) But for all its excesses, it kept drawing me in. I still listen to the fade out from “Dissidents” into “The Flat Earth” and feel a thrill all over again, all those gangly licks and hard-edged FM tones giving way to hushed percussion and a yielding soundfield… It’s funny, too, to listen today to the title track and even hear the tiniest hint of disco and proto-house in the rolling conga rhythms, things I had absolutely no idea about then. Whatever its failures, this was the album that, more than any other up until that time, convinced me that records offered more than just a hook and a chorus, that they deserved to be puzzled through, analyzed, unpacked. That they offered up their own little worlds, worlds I would aspire to inhabit. Read the rest of this entry »
Auch wenn er vermutlich niemals aus dem Kollektivgedächtnis der House-Liebhaber verschwinden wird, es soll hier, aus zu immer gegebenen Anlass, abermals an den legendärsten Abtrünnigen in der Geschichte von House erinnert werden: Bobby Konders. Er mastermixte sich bis Anfang der 90er Jahre bei New Yorks Radiosender WBLS einen klangvollen Namen mit House, Reggae, Hip Hop und Disco-Klassikern, dann erschütterte er in einem überschaubaren Zeitraum von 1989 bis 1993 die Clubkultur mit Platten, in denen er die oben genannten Musikstile zu Produktionen verknüpfte, die immer noch ihresgleichen suchen. Seine Soundidee klingt in der Theorie simpel, war aber in der Ausführung zum Verzweifeln originär. Konders injizierte die Bassschwere und das Raum- und Zeitgefühl von Dub in den House-Sound, reicherte dies mit der Tiefe und Virtuosität von Peter Daous Keyboards an, dem wohl klassischsten aller New Yorker Studiomusiker der dortigen Szene, und erzeugte so eine Musik, die gleichzeitig drücken und schweben konnte, und bei aller rohen Unmittelbarkeit stets erhaben und überlegen schien. Selbst bei einer etwas wirr anmutenden Abfolge von Remix-Auftragsarbeiten zwischen den Associates, Foremost Poets bis hin zu Herb Alpert, ließ sich dieses Patentrezept problemlos übersetzen, stets war das Ergebnis der pure Bobby Konders-Zauber, in bestechend konsistenter Qualität. Diese EP von 1990 ist das Manifest dieser Schaffensperiode. Egal ob dubbiger Acid („Nervous Acid“), deeper Flöten-House (“The Poem“), technoider Freestyle (“Let There Be House“), oder rootsiger Hypno-House (“Massai Women”), mit den dazugehörigen Versions, jeder der sechs Tracks wurde zu einem Klassiker, fortwährendes Zeugnis vom immensen Talent eines Produzenten, seine Vorlieben und Ideen scheinbar mühelos in einen Trademark-Sound zu transferieren, der stets gültig bleibt, und an dem sich bis in alle Zeiten die Epigonen die Zähne ausbeißen werden. Und was macht das Genie, das viel besungene? Es pfeift auf die bedingungslose Verehrung seiner Anhängerschar, legt sich auf seine erste, größere Liebe zu Reggae und Dancehall fest, und produziert nie wieder einen House-Track. Keine Retrospektiven, Überredungskünste oder Gagenangebote, die sich zu Clubkultur verhalten wie Abba zu Pop, haben daran etwas ändern können. Es hat natürlich auch nicht geholfen, dass seine Karriere in diesem… anderen… Betätigungsfeld seiner Wahl ähnlich legendär und einflussreich verlief, und wesentlich mehr Geld einbrachte. Was bleibt ist ein Werk von erdrückendem Ausnahmestatus, und die Erkenntnis, dass es niemals wieder vorkommen sollte, dass jemand von solchen Gaben einfach abspringt. Von noch so einer Verschmähung, solch einem tiefen Schock, würde sich House wohl nicht mehr erholen können.
In discussion with Terre Thaemlitz about the album “Dazzle Ships” by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (1983).
A lot of interesting electronic music was produced in 1983, the year “Dazzle Ships” was released. What drew you to Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, and this album in particular?
To be honest, I don’t recall exactly how I came to own this record. I think it was probably the usual budgetary situation where I had heard about OMD, I wanted to buy a record to check them out, and “Dazzle Ships” was the cheapest album to buy. As a teen, my record collection was built on unpopular records from the $1.00 bin. This was economically unavoidable. It also meant my point of entry for a lot of bands was through their “commercial flops”. And as an “outsider” who did not fit in with others and was therefore a flop of sorts myself, I found resonance with these failures at assimilation. Gary Numan’s “Dance” is a brilliant example – thinking back, to be 13 years old in Springfield, Missouri, and really into that album, it really signifies a kind of social isolation. A “normal” or “healthy” 13 year old could not be into that album. Impossible. So I believe this entire process of arriving at an album like “Dazzle Ships” must never be reduced to a simple matter of taste. It’s tied to issues of economics, class, socialization… in the US it is also tied to race and the divide between “black music” and “white music,” etc.
With this album, OMD experimented with elements beyond their Pop abilities, like shortwave recordings, sound collages and cold war/eastern bloc imagery. How would you describe the concept of this album?
I think “Architecture & Morality” already introduced a lot of those elements. I don’t know for sure, but as a producer myself I imagine this is partly related to the emergence of better sampling technology. They could use samplers to play back all kinds of sound elements, rather than being limited to synths and multi-track recording. I also imagine, drawing from my own experiences, that “Dazzle Ships” (like Numan’s “Dance”) represents a crisis in their relationships to their record labels and Pop music generally. A crisis with capitalism, the demand for sales, demand for audio conformity… and in this way the socialist imagery of the album is perhaps a reflection of their struggling against these processes. I remember reading some article – which I have no idea if it was trustworthy or not, but – it talked about the tremendous pressure labels put on OMD to become more Pop. I believe they were asked to finally decide if they wanted to be the new “Abba” or not, and if so, to change their style accordingly. This was a brutal trend in UK new wave. It destroyed the Eurythmics, The Human League, Gary Numan, OMD, Depeche Mode, and on and on… These are all UK bands, all extremely influential, and all totally boring in the end. Very few groups came out of these struggles for the better – one exception being Talk Talk, who did abandon their synth sound but became something marvelously unmarketable in another way. All of these New Wave bands had to become Rock bands capable of penetrating the US market, blah, blah – dumb American Dreams. Techno-Pop was dismissed as a fad by industry, and the artists seem to have gotten swept up in the hype of possible “success”. Ironically, of course, even if they got a brief flash of super-Pop success they alienated their core fans who had been drawn to them as other than Pop. I know I felt extremely betrayed. I still do, at age 41. When I was young, it was a personal betrayal, now it strikes me as a cultural betrayal. I could be totally wrong, but I guess for me, all of this feeds into the concept of “Dazzle Ships”, the title being a reference to massive battle ships. The idea of sending this album afloat in the marketplace, poised to attack and conquer as the label wants – but stylistically it also clearly sabotages any prospect of popularity. I think it was OMD’s attack on the labels that released it – a final kick in resistance before transforming into the Pop band that produced “Junk Culture” (although it could have also been a tremendous extension of A&R pampering in which the label let their artists run amuck – but that is so much less inspiring to me). And you have to forgive me, coming from the US, I have no idea how these records operated in Europe. I can imagine they got radio play. But not in the US. So my view is slanted by this. In the US these were all anti-Pop albums with no airplay, except in a few major cities. They had to be hunted down. And this camouflaged cover, in a way, also carried this metaphor of a product hidden in the marketplace, hard to find, elusive. But present. I like this metaphor – it predates the queer motto “We are everywhere” by a good number of years. Read the rest of this entry »
Im Gespräch mit Cio D’Or über “Upekah” von Son.sine (2000).
Neuseeland ist eher nicht für elektronische Musik bekannt. Wie bist du auf Son.sine gestoßen? Kennst Du andere Produktionen von diesem Künstler?
Ich hörte ihn das erste Mal in einem Mix und verliebte mich sofort in den Track, unwissendlich, wer der Künstler ist. Danach brachte mir ein Freund einige Tracks von sich mit, sowie auch diesen. Da kein Name auf dem Wav-File war, wusste ich noch immer nicht, von wem das Stück ist. Bei meinem letzten Radiomix für Oceanclub baute ich ihn mit ein und er war das einzige unbenannte Stück. Erst Chris von mnml ssgs meinte dann „Wow…there is Son.sine’s „Upekah“ from Nurture“, und somit konnte ich ihn endlich orten. Andere Produktionen hörte ich mir noch an, die mir auch gut gefallen haben, aber „Upekah“ ist für mich nicht zu toppen. Neuseeland scheint ein guter Ort für Musikproduktionen zu sein.
Wie würdest Du diese Platte beschreiben?
Unendliche Tiefen mit einer zärtlichen und berührenden, fast schmerzenden Schönheit, die sowohl Trauer als auch Glück in sich trägt. Mit einer großen Portion Sehnsucht und dennoch Hoffnung und Unendlichkeit, einem grandiosen, subtilen Rhythmus und die Auflösung heißt: Vorangehen, nach vorn schauen, und dennoch den Moment leben und bejahen. Am Schluss hat der Track sogar etwas Forsches und Treibendes. Einfach eine großartige Widerspiegelung diverser Emotionen und absolut Weltklasse in ihrer Vielschichtigkeit in dieser Kategorie Musik! Wow! Danke, Son.sine! Read the rest of this entry »
Mix with some German house music favourites, compiled and mixed for Motion FM radio.
Whirlpool Productions – The Cold Song (Ladomat 2000) Tiefschwarz Feat. Oezlem – Never (Four Music) Cassy – Night to Remember (Perlon) Sensorama – Quarzzeit (Ladomat 2000) DJ Linus – Pleasure (Freudenhouse) Losoul – Sunbeams And The Rain (Playhouse) Dntel – (This Is) The Dream Of Evan And Chan (Superpitcher Kompakt Remix) (Plug Research) Superpitcher – Happiness (Kompakt) Blumfeld – Tausend Tränen Tief (Loverboy Mix) (Rough Trade) Round Two – New Day (Main Street) Blumfeld – Neuer Morgen (Vredus Remix) (Wea) Jürgen Paape – So Weit Wie Noch Nie (Kompakt) Commercial Breakup – Walking Back Home (Ladomat 2000)
William T Burnett alias Speculator unterhält von Brooklyn schon seit Jahren die schrullige Diggerwissen-Sendung „Short Bus Radio“ und hat nun sein eigenes Label gegründet. Die erste 12“ ist überraschend housig, und nicht nur das, sie ist schlichtweg sensationell. Bei $tinkworx holpern sich trunkene Pianos und wehmütige Flächen und eine Acid-Bassline in einen absolut wundervollen zehnminütigen Taumel, bei dem man jeden Laternenpfahl mitnehmen würde, wenn man ihn auf dem Nachhauseweg lautstark in den Ohren hätte. Kinoeye AKA Datahata ebenso bestechend, mit einem launischen Spoken Word-Track, bei dem über rumpelige Beats, Bleeps und leicht manische Kreiselsounds die eigene Entschlossenheit angesichts der Dreckswelt hochgehalten wird. Suck on this, Wohlklangfraktion.
Die funkige Flanke der klassischen Post Punk-Ära hat der Nachwelt so manche Sensation zum Nachdenken mitgegeben, und der gewiss großartige James Chance wird im Kanon gemeinhin als das Nonplusultra dessen angesehen, was mit von Nadeln und Speed angefeuerter Hyperaktivität und autodidaktischen Überrollmanövern traditioneller Strukturen zwischen Disco, Funk und Jazz noch möglich war, ohne sofort zu implodieren. Das wäre auch sofort zu unterschreiben, wenn die Alben „This Is The Master Brew“ (1982) und „Get On Board“ (1983) der genialen Stickmen aus Philadelphia nicht existieren würden. Diese nach dem Tod vom Frontmann Peter L. Baker von den restlichen Bandmitgliedern zusammengestellte CD enthält die komplette musikalische Hinterlassenschaft. 22 Stücke in 45 Minuten, womit allein schon das irrsinnige Tempo dokumentiert wäre, in dem sich die Stickmen durch ihren einzigartigen Sound flirren, der grob irgendwo zwischen Albert Ayler, George Clinton und den B-52’s und einer Restmenge von ungefähr sämtlicher verbleibender Kultur des Abendlandes nach der Jahrhundertwende einzuschätzen ist, und alles passiert gefühlt gleichzeitig. Kein Motiv wird länger als ein paar Takte geritten, bevor Baker sekundengenau die totale Kehrtwende in einer völlig übergeschnappten Disco-Pop Art-Sci Fi-Geheimsprache anzählt und die Band messerscharf auf den Punkt in die nächste absurde Wendung davon rappelt. Jeder Song klingt wie mindestens zwanzig in einem und nach jedem ist man völlig alle. Die Band ist da schon längst wieder völlig woanders und man muss sich verdammt beeilen, um nicht den Anschluss zu verlieren. Dass sie diesen wahnwitzigen Virtuositäts- und Beschleunigungslevel jederzeit abrufen konnten, ist auf ebenfalls enthaltenen Live-Videos und Konzert- und Radiomitschnitten dokumentiert. Daneben wirken Mr. Bungle wie die Dire Straits.
If the D.H.S. or any other member of D*ruffalo should drop whilst in the club from contamination, put them outside, but remember to tag them first for identification purposes.
Ours is the last mix that you will ever hear. Do not be alarmed.
ABC – Overture Philip Jap – Save Us Frankie Goes To Hollywood – War (Hide Yourself) (Excerpt) Propaganda – Duel (Bittersweet) Frankie Goes To Hollywood – One February Friday Marc Almond – Prelude Marc Almond – Jacky Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Two Tribes (Annihilation) Pet Shop Boys – Left To My Own Devices (The Disco Mix) Pet Shop Boys – It’s Alright (Extended Version) Pet Shop Boys – The Sound Of The Atom Splitting Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Well… Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Welcome To The Pleasuredome (Real Altered) Propaganda – p:Machinery (Polish) The Art Of Noise – Egypt The Art Of Noise – Beat Box (Diversion Two) The Art Of Noise – Close-Up The Art Of Noise – Beat Box (Diversion One) Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Relax (International) (Excerpt) Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Relax (Sex Mix) Malcolm McLaren – D’ya Like Scratchin’? Malcolm McLaren – Duck Rock Cheer Malcolm McLaren – First Couple Out (Extended Mix) Malcolm McLaren – Merengue Propaganda – Frozen Faces Dollar – Hand Held In Black And White ABC – The Look Of Love (Part Four) ABC – The Look Of Love (Part One) Spandau Ballet – Instinction Marc Almond – Trois Chansons De Bilitis (Extract) Marc Almond – The Days Of Pearly Spencer Propaganda – Das Testament Des Mabuse Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Rage Hard (+) Malcolm McLaren & World’s Famous Supreme Team – World’s Famous (Radio ID) Dollar – Videotheque Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Black Night White Light Propaganda – The Chase ABC – All Of My Heart Dollar – Give Me Back My Heart Anne Pigalle – Why Does It Have To This Way… The Art Of Noise – A Time Of Fear (Who’s Afraid?) Propaganda – Dream Within A Dream Godley & Crème – Cry (Extended Remix) Grace Jones – The Crossing (Ooh The Action) Grace Jones – Don’t Cry-It’s Only The Rhythm Grace Jones – Ladies & Gentlemen: Miss Grace Jones Marc Almond – My Hand Over My Heart (Grit And Glitter Mix) The Art Of Noise – Moments In Love (Beaten) Frankie Goes To Hollywood – The Power Of Love (Leave The Rest To The Gods)
Peter Kruder – The Law Of Return (Macro) Red Sparrow – That’s The Way Of The World (United States Of Mars) Santiago Salazar – Arcade (Stefan Goldmann Mix) (Macro) Technose Distrikt – Untitled (Rush Hour) Katelectro – Plug (Ultradyne Remix) (Mighty Robot Recordings) DJ Sneak – Fear The World (Defiant) Reggie Hall – I’ll Keep On Workin’ You (Urgent Music Works) The Pig – Are You…? (Rush Hour) Aaron Carl & Benjamin Hayes – The Struggle (Remix By The Plan) (Wallshaker) DJ Sprinkles – Sloppy 42nds (Glorimar’s Deeperama) (Mule Electronic) Raudive – Tul (Macro) Pépé Bradock – 100% Coton (Kif Recordings)
As a respected journalist, in many ways you educate your readers. Would you say that this comes across in your DJ sets as well?
To a certain extent. In the days before the internet made all sorts of musical knowledge easily accessible it was more important, because apart from what you could gather in the print media and some specialist TV and radio programs, the DJ at the club was the one to offer the glimpse of what was going on. I have benefited a lot from the skills and taste of DJs like Klaus Stockhausen and others back then, who knew what music really mattered and who also knew how to best spread their knowledge as an intense party experience. If that works, it is the perfect way of learning about music. I was always interested in the historical context of culture and I like to connect the dots between prototypes and later developments and so in the past I felt the need to adopt that, playing a lot of records I felt missed out on the deserved recognition along better known stuff, in order to make people wonder and dance at the same time. I still do that, but now a lot of the rare records I would say are worth discovering are very likely to be discussed on specialist boards anyway, and you can easily gather the information with a few clicks that once took quite a while of digging and research. But this inevitably led to DJing with a mere collector’s approach, which often results in a showcase of rare items and not in a good party. I also don’t like when such sets are presented like the real deal and authentic, as I have been around clubs for a long time now and DJs playing whole nights of just obscure music were the absolute exception. I am very aware of the privilege of having been there when some the music people still dance to today was in early progress, and so I like to play older records like I remember them being played at the time they were introduced. And of course I use the web myself to learn how pioneering DJs played certain records in certain clubs. That is not obliging for how I choose the records for the night, but it satisfies my curiosity. I always make a few steps forward and a few steps back with what I play, and I reserve the specialist program for radio shows and mixes I make or get asked for. For gigs, the way I put my record box together has always been the same, I just pack the tracks that I would like to dance to if I was attending the club the same night, and that’s it.
Tell us a bit about Macro and the label’s plans for the future.
Macro was conceived by Stefan and me to be both a platform for his productions and other music we like, with no artistic and stylistic restrictions apart from a high quality standard. We just wanted our label releases and identity to stand out via artwork and concept from other output we deemed interchangeable and risk-free. Thankfully our ideas caught on so quickly that we got approached by other artists and producers we admire who like the idea of releasing on a label that is laying emphasis on individuality and some lasting impressions instead of just exploiting the trends of the season. You can hear some of the results in this mix. There is a track from our first release this year by Oliver Ho as Raudive, Stefan’s stunning remix of Santiago Salazar’s “Arcade”, which is about to hit the shops, and a track from the forthcoming 12″ Peter Kruder produced for us. Furthermore Stefan’s edit experiment with Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” is going to be released in early June and later this year we will unleash a very special album project with an accompanying series of 12″s, the preparations of which have kept us well busy and buzzing with anticipation since last year. We think it is quite a sensation.
You are known for fusing Disco and Classics in your DJ sets. What changed in your approach for the Sweatlodge set?
I still play a lot of sets where I combine Disco and other related older genres with modern electronic music, but I don’t want to do so per se. I like to treat every set as a new position, be it topical, stylistically or based on a certain purpose. This is basically an excerpt of some favourite sounds I play at the moment as a DJ representing Macro. A hopefully coherent mix of old and new. On another day it could have turned out to sound completely different, but this is how I felt it should be at the time I dropped the needle on the first record. Generally, I have a lot of records to choose from and I try to make good use of that.
Where have you played in the past that you would really want to re-visit again?
We just had our first label night at Panoramabar, and that was predictably an experience I very much look forward to repeat. I also did a nine hour plus back-to-back Disco set with Hunee last Summer at Picknick’s yard which was quite immense and shall happen again. Berlin is buzzing with great clubs, partys, DJs and devoted dancers at the moment, but I have no preferences but a good night out, and I have no doubts I will have some of that for the rest of the year. I’m also looking forward to some gigs lined up beyond Berlin, because I like to travel around and witness some other cities and the according scenes. We’re also working on taking the label out for some dates, and I happily await some fine experiences lying ahead of me with that.
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